


A Thunderstorm in Michigan, 2007, 2071

by lapsi



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Gen, Hyper competitive jock Hank Anderson, Mortality, Post Series, Unhappy Ending, Young Hank Anderson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-11 23:43:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15327018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapsi/pseuds/lapsi
Summary: “Hello, my name’s Connor. I’m your assigned roommate,” says the cleancut man in the police academy exercise uniform, smiling up at Hank as if they were old friends.~30 years post series, Black Mirror-esque AU. Not a happy story.





	A Thunderstorm in Michigan, 2007, 2071

“Hello, my name’s Connor. I’m your assigned roommate,” says the cleancut man in the police academy exercise uniform, smiling up at Hank as if they were old friends. He shakes out an umbrella, sets it beside the door. Behind him, the world is sheets of undulating water amidst the last dying evening. Connor looks familiar, but Hank can’t assign any association or context. The man isn’t particularly unusual looking, brown hair and eyes, delicate features but a strong jaw. His most marked characteristic has to be that he's unusually handsome. Maybe he looks like a movie star Hank can’t bring to mind. That’s probably it. Some kind of Tom Cruise knock-off action hero with the same sort of haircut.  
“Hank. Hank Anderson,” he says, extending his hand. He shakes the slightly shorter man’s hand hard, stepping out of the way to allow him into the two bed dorm room. “Thought I was going to have the place to myself.”

 

“I will endeavour to be an unobtrusive presence here,” the man contributes, straight-faced.  
_Christ, what am I working with? Is he on the spectrum, or just busting my balls?_ “Look, as long as you lock the shower door when you’re jerking off, and keep your shit out of my half of the room, I’m sure we’ll get along fine.”  
Connor gives him an evaluating look, and then nods. He sets down a black and blue rucksack on the empty bed, straightens up again, smoothing the police track uniform. Every motion is a little too overwrought to seem natural.  
“So, what do you run?” Hank asks, unable to resist.  
“Pardon me?”  
“You know. What does a mile set you back? How fast are you? ...your speed, your pace, am I having a fucking stroke here? Are the words coming out my mouth English? Has one side of my face gone droopy?”  
“Oh. Three minutes, twelve seconds. You’re speaking English, and your face looks fine.”

 

“A three minute mile,” Hank says, raising an eyebrow. “And I thought you were completely fucking humorless.” He splits into a grin. “Well, I’m almost down to five minutes. So I guess there’s no point training together.”  
“Five minutes fifteen seconds,” Connor admits, smiling softly. “I’d certainly enjoy training together.”  
“You training for something in particular? Sport? Lemme guess, baseball? You look like you play baseball. Skinny little bastard.”  
“I just run.”  
“How far?”  
“That depends on who I’m chasing.”  
Hank rolls his eyes, but the smile stays. “Jeff and I are going for drinks with a couple of fellow wannabe cops. There’s a decent bar about fifteen minutes walk from here, and the actual course doesn’t start ‘til Monday. Just gonna head down to Murphy's, shoot the shit, and I'll kick everyone's asses at pool and whatever drinking game Henry starts us off on. You should come. Introduce yourself to the boys." He looks Connor over, one eyebrow cocked. "...sans short shorts, dare I suggest.”  
“I was going to train.”  
“Train? Seriously? In this fucking weather?”  
“Yes. The obstacle courses,” Connor says, examining Hank’s Radiohead poster curiously. Hank stuck it up with blu-tack, just to add some personality to his side of the room. He doesn’t really care to have it given such overt consideration. “I don’t drink.”

 

Hank feels the blaze of competitiveness beginning. New kid probably thinks he’s hot shit, with his _five minutes fifteen seconds_ and his tee-totalling, antisocial bullshit. Looks like a trustfund prep. Maybe he’s already been through college. He could be twenty two or three. “You like the album?” he asks, restraining his mostly hypothetical ire.  
“OK Computer? I haven’t heard it.”  
“What sort of music do you listen to?”  
“...jazz. A band called Knights of The Black Death.”  
“Huh. Never heard of ‘em,” Hank says, giving Connor the side-eye. The niggling guilt kicks in. Does he really need another night getting shitfaced with Jeffrey, showing off his pool tricks? “Okay. Fine.”  
“Pardon me?”  
“You can just say ‘what’, like a normal person. I won’t snitch on you to Sergeant Weston, Connor. _Fine_ , I’ll train with you.”  
“Okay,” Connor says, and smiles earnestly. “I’d really like to have the company.”

 

 _Maybe not a smug douchebag after all. Still definitely a weirdo._ Hank strips off his shirt, stretching out his broad shoulders. “I played some football. Not like I was ever the star quarterback, but I played wing. Actually, I played a bit of everything in highschool. Used to be much fitter, though I never did much track outside of training.”  
“Effectively giving chase is an important skill in police field work. But unless you’re breaking apart a doping ring in an Olympic track team, I doubt many perps will be able to outrun you. Five minutes to a mile is several standard deviations away from the norm.”  
“I'm not gonna let those greased lightning, drug-cheating fuckers get away scott free, am I? Gonna get it down to four and a half,” Hank says through a facefull of tshirt as he tugs it down over his head. He pulls off his shorts, noticing Connor’s eyes on him momentarily. Connor looks away, back at the poster. Maybe he’s gay, and that’s the strange vibe Hank’s picking up. Well, live and let live. It’s 2007. Hopefully he hasn’t mistaken the training session for a date. “So you really don’t drink?” he asks, bending to tie his runners.

 

“I lost someone very close to me, to alcoholism,” Connor explains, a strange tilt to his voice.  
Hank freezes, grimacing his way through an apologetic “I’m sorry.”  
“Thank you. It was hepatocellular carcinoma. Liver cancer. Very asymptomatic, and by the time it was detected, it had metastasized to his spinal cord, and a portion of his brain. He was paralyzed.”  
A frown line settles in between Hank’s blond brows. “Shit. I probably wouldn’t touch the stuff either, after that. ...I drink way too much. I mean, I guess most people do, but--”  
“Well, you can train with me, instead of drinking, tonight. I can be a positive influence on your future liver health.”  
“My hero,” Hank says sarcastically, opening the door and wincing at the deluge. “Jesus fucking Christ. We’re not running the obstacle course. You’d have to be _certifiably insane_ to train in this.”

 

Thunder coils around the Michigan countryside as Hank scrambles his way over the wooden wall. His fifth time climbing it, and it's not getting any goddamn easier. The lashing rain has him drenched, to his core, maybe beyond his core. He feels like his entire, aching, numb body is just part of the environment. The storm is flowing through him unimpeded by burning flesh and aching joints. He clings with unfeeling fingertips to the sharp edge, trying to keep purchase on the wet wood. Ahead, Connor looks over his shoulder, perfectly straight teeth shining through his splattered mud face.  
“Having trouble there, Hank?”  
“You’re one of those… masochists… huh?” Hank blows out between desperate drags of oxygen. Everyone around the academy calls him ‘Anderson’. His first name sounds overfamiliar in his new roommate's mouth. “Bet you’ve got one of those Da Vinci Code torture devices under that fucking t-shirt,” Hank says. He tries to ease himself down the wooden boards, but he loses his grip on the wet rope, falling awkwardly into the muddy base. At once, there’s a steadying hand hauling him upright. Connor is a hell of a lot stronger than he looks. The brown haired man is still smiling as he pulls up his tshirt, showing the taut stomach beneath, free of any bloodied cilice. His abdominal muscles are working, but not the same heaving desperation that Hank expected to see echoed on his training partner.

 

Hank’s certainty that he’d blow all of his classmates out of the water in the physicals is taking a beating. What the fuck is this guy made of? He jerks out of Connor’s grasp with narrowed eyes. “I’m _fine_ .”  
“Sorry,” Connor says, studying him in the wild darkness. Lightning appears behind him, like a heavenly door is opened a crack, then slammed deafeningly. Connor doesn’t even flinch at the thunder rolling about the valley.  
Hank feels his lips twisting to a sneer, unwilling to go down so readily. “I’ll beat you across that field and back. And we can run the whole thing again, and I’ll whoop your ass at that too. I just needed to warm up,” says Hank, feeling disembodied from the cockiness. Mouth making promises he’s not sure his body is capable of fulfilling. But he doesn’t need to go forever. He just needs to go until he breaks this motherfucker’s resolve.  
Connor is still staring at him, and then nods, turns on one step and takes off towards the green.  
Hank heaves down one luxurious lungful of air and sprints after him. His feet pound into the slick grass, gaining on, then overtaking Connor. The rain stings his cheeks on the way back, but he doesn’t relent until he’s at the course’s beginning. He gets a breather as he waits for the shorter man to catch up. Connor is panting now. _Eat shit, trust fund._  
“One. Two. Three,” Hank says, a challenging grin spreading across his face as he leaps for the rope-strung monkey bars. He feels Connor’s weight tugging beside him, glances over, resentment washing away from him with the rain trickling off his drenched running shoes. Connor smiles, though it looks exhausted. _Not a bad training partner, all things considered._

 

They both suck air at the other end of the obstacle course, beyond conversation. Hank is too physically exerted to be cold. He pulls off his muddied shirt, smeared brown where he’d crawled under the low bars of the course and splattered about everywhere else, and wipes his face with the clean interior. Connor copies him instinctively. Connor’s shoulder are much thinner than his, his figure more lithe in general. _Not a bad physical effort for a skinny guy._  
“You’d really say no to a beer after that?”  
Connor nods firmly, but smiles. “You’re a good partner. To train with.”  
“You’re not such a bad partner either. Better than Jeff. Fat fucking lump he’s gonna be if he keeps leaving academy grounds for beer and burgers.”  
Connor cocks his head a little. “Jeffrey Fowler?”  
“Hey, you two know each other?”  
“We’ve met, yes. I wouldn’t say we’re friends.”  
Hank snorts. “Yeah, I’ll bet. You don’t strike me as someone who makes friends so easy, Connor.”  
“Well, you’re my friend. And we only met a few hours ago.”

 

Hank is sure he’s being screwed with. No change to the wide eyed seriousness. _Weirdo wears his heart on his fucking sleeve, huh?_ It’s oddly endearing. He has a strange sense of deja vu, shakes it off and tucks his filthy shirt into his waistband. He turns back towards the ‘70s blocks that compose the academy dorms. “Better dump this stuff in the laundry. I hear they do spot inspections, and I’m not getting stuck on fucking kitchen duty because we tracked in enough mud to fire up a city block worth of bricks.”  
“This soil is low clay content. The bricks would disintegrate very rapidly. Your city block would be washed out by the first thunderstorm.”  
“Christ. You don’t shut up, do you?”  
Connor says nothing. He seems distracted.  
Then he’s gone, and so is the rain, the ache of Hank's spent physique, the purple glow of the sky.

 

~~~

  
“Sir. Visiting hours are--”  
Connor jerks backwards, eyes wide in an attempt to process the environment around him rapidfire. Ascertain his reality again. The room is so full of light compared to the stormy night he'd departed from. A vital monitor beeps steadily, and a dialysis machine clicks and pumps beside it. He stares up at the young nurse, with her dyed purple hair, her tentative expression. Her eyes have travelled down to the bed, finally noticing the white device resting against Hank Anderson’s forehead.  
“Sorry. I didn’t see the MemMod going. _Sorry_ .”  
Connor palms a hand over his mouth, fingers twitching. “That’s okay. I was simply startled.”

 

“If you want to sleep next visit, while you run something for him, I can get you a fold out. Pretty boring for you to watch Dad dream, right?” She winces, probably recalling that Hank Anderson has been comatose for almost four years now. Connor hasn't seen her before. Definitely a new staff member. "Sorry. Grandpa?"  
“I was connected,” Connor explains, patiently. “And he’s not my father. Or my grandfather.”  
Her eyes widen, and he can see her evaluating his features to try to place him as an android. No LED to give that away now, not so many years after liberation. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

 

“No apology is necessary,” Connor returns evenly, lips twitching into a forced smile. “Visiting hours are over, I believe you were about to inform me.”  
“Yeah. We open again at nine, if you want to come back.”  
“Thank you,” Connor says.  
She smiles up at him still, toying with Hank’s medical chart. “That’s… really sweet of you to visit. Not to mention springing for a MemMod. I used one once, the med school’s machine. Always wished I could afford one. Got plenty of memories I'd like a chance to do over.  ...I guess you were good friends?”  
Connor nods, unable to meet the kind eyes. He unfolds neatly from the chair, stooping over Hank’s hospital bed. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he promises the unmoving, unresponsive man. He gently unclips the contacts, then brushes the papery, yellowed forehead with a cleaning wipe to eliminate the conductive gel. He closes the memory modification unit, shutting the expensive machine inside a perspex and foam case before turning back. His fingers rest over the down-soft white hair, brushing back a few strands from where they’re sticking to the damp hydration the facial wipe left behind. Connor would like to believe there’s a smile on the thin, jaundiced lips. “It was lovely to meet you, Hank.”


End file.
